Wednesday’s “super league” announcement in Colorado Springs will dramatically change the college hockey landscape, including how I cover the NCAA Tournament. The chosen ones — 2011 NCAA Tournament participants DU, CC, North Dakota, Miami (Ohio), Minnesota-Duluth and Nebraska-Omaha — will publicly announce their intentions to split from the WCHA and CCHA, respectively, and form a star-studded start-up league that they hope will eventually include Notre Dame by the time it debuts for the 2013-14 season.

On one hand, I love this move because the super league will make a fine non-conference scheduling partner with the Big Ten (Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Michigan State, Ohio State, Penn State). So the primary team I cover, DU, will mostly be playing big-time hockey programs on national or regional television.

The Big Ten will have the Big Ten Network, and the super league is rumored to have reached a deal — or will undoubtedly reach a deal with Notre Dame in the mix — with Versus/NBC to complement the network’s NHL weekday coverage.

If that’s the way it unfolds, I might have a better chance of covering Air Force in the NCAA Tournament than the Pioneers or CC Tigers. That is, if the NCAA Tournament doesn’t tweak its computer selection model and increase the reward for strength of schedule and quality wins.

The play-by-play voice of ESPN’s Thursday night college football won’t need a map to find Boulder – or to get around the University of Colorado campus, for that matter.

Chris Fowler, a 1985 Colorado graduate best known for anchoring ESPN’s College GameDay show on Saturday mornings, will be joined for ESPN’s telecast of the CU vs. West Virginia game by Craig James, Jesse Palmer and Erin Andrews. Read more…

Cholet, France — A major upset occurred at Tuesday’s Tour de France. I, John Howard Henderson, did not get lost.

The hundreds of cycling journalists who cover this event every year know me well. I’m the one who comes into the salle de presse (press room) every day, frazzled, broken and beaten. My hair is half torn out. My eyes are bloodshot. My heart is racing faster than all of these cyclists.

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David Millar of Great Britain during the third stage near Cholet, France. (AP Photo/Patrice Mollet)

Getting lost is part of the di rigueur at the Tour. However, in four previous years covering this remarkable, beautiful, maddening event, I turned getting lost into an art form. It once took me 45 minutes to get out of a parking lot. Hey, I didn’t know if I was leaving the right way. In France, if you get going in the wrong direction, you’ll be in Pamplona looking for bulls to trample you by the time you know you’re lost.

I can now personally confirm that Speedo’s ballyhooed LZR Racer swimsuit does make you go faster. It helped me annihilate my predicted time in Sunday’s media 50-meter freestyle here in Omaha, Neb.

Then again, my predicted time was Tuesday.

In what was no doubt a poorly disguised plot to make the swimming media look bad – in more ways than one – the Olympic Trials let the media literally test the waters at the Qwest Center. Omega organized it, presumably in hopes of testing its new hourglass timepiece.

I did it merely to see what it’s like to swim in what Michael Phelps calls “the fastest swimsuit in the world,” to have some fun after a hectic week and to finally give the slacker lifeguards here something to do.

We didn’t know what would be harder, swimming the 50-meter pool without making a fool of ourselves or getting into the LZR Racer and looking worse. We’d heard horror stories. Natalie Coughlin, the U.S. swimming star, says it takes her 25 minutes to put it on. It takes me less time to don a wetsuit and scuba gear. Then again, speed isn’t a huge component in scuba diving.

The perfect scenario for Nebraska football fans would be to: A) watch the Cornhuskers defeat Colorado on Friday in Boulder, B) have interim athletic director Tom Osborne fire head coach Bill Callahan on Saturday, C) have Nebraska earn a bowl bid, and D) get the new coach on board in time to coach the Huskers in the bowl so he gets a jump on next season.

Media members in Nebraska seem to like the Huskers’ chances at Folsom Field – a lot. Granted, the match-up between Nebraska quarterback Joe Ganz and a Colorado secondary likely to missing its top cover corner Terrence Wheatley (foot injury) doesn’t look pretty for the Buffaloes.